With more than 563,000 deaths in the United States annually, cancer is the second leading cause of death behind heart disease (UBS Warburg “Disease Dynamics: The Cancer Market,” Nov. 8, 2000). Surgery and radiotherapy may be curative if the disease is found early, but current drug therapies for metastatic disease are mostly palliative and seldom offer a long-term cure. Even with the new chemotherapies entering the market, improvement in patient survival is measured in months rather than in years, and the need continues for new drugs effective both in combination with existing agents as first line therapy and as second and third line therapies in treatment of resistant tumors.
A need remains in the art for improved cell proliferation disorder and cancer treatments.